The Blog

March 1, 2013

Salesforce Customer Choice Awards

It’s award season and everyone is getting into the act. And why not? There is a heck of a lot of business software goodness out there and not enough recognition if you ask me. So even if a company like Salesforce has a customer voted award that ultimately reflects back on itself, no worries.

Salesforce recently announced the 2012 Customer Choice Awards, the results of customer opinion and voting that ranked some of the more interesting applications in the AppExchange. To be sure, many of the names on the list have been there before and many are the SaaS products of larger entities — some were acquired which is how the situation presents itself. But each had to show something special or they wouldn’t have been voted for. After all with more than 1700 apps in the AppExchange, there’s a lot to choose from.

Briefly the winners are:

Adobe EchoSign by Adobe

Hoopla Scoreboard by Hoopla Software

Opportunity Management Optimizer by Sales Optimizer

Geopointe by Arrowpointe

Configurator by Big Machines

Xactly Incent by Xactly

Informatica Cloud Integration for Salesforce

Marketo Marketing Automation by Marketo

Jobscience for Professional Recruiting by Jobscience

Ascent by Precisio Business Solutions

Sales Pipeline Visualization by SalesClic

What’s interesting to me is that most of the winners have nothing to do with social or very little, at least. It says to me that maybe we’ve been spending too much time and mental energy on social recently and that real work still gets done away from social. Moreover the value of getting the forecast right, or speeding up the contract execution process or enabling a better way to market or to support the HR department is at least as important as social, according to this customer sourced list.

It is also fascinating to see how many non-CRM and non-traditional applications are on the list. Many are true long tail apps that have thin (though not small) markets and might not even exist if it weren’t for the subscription business model.

Finally, some of these apps are owned by large public companies and others have hefty chunks of OPM (other people’s money a.k.a. venture capital) giving them lift. What’s important about this is the idea that these companies are serious money makers and are taken seriously by the capital markets. No longer is it necessary to amass a big pile of money to spend on servers, desks and buildings. A subscription company can get started for a song and be taken seriously by the users and by investors.

So, next time someone tries to tell you that all vendor ecosystems are the same take a hard look and ask if they all do what this one does. The Customer Choice Awards nicely highlight a new way to do business for vendors and customers.